News about the author of Florence Foster Jenkins, David Bowie Made Me Gay and The World's Worst Records Volumes One and Two

Monday, 23 October 2017

Out of Tune

My biography of Florence Foster Jenkins is being issued in paperback in the US next month. This great review, by the best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith, appeared in the New York Times last year.

FLORENCE! FOSTER!! JENKINS!!!

The Life of the World’s Worst Opera Singer

By Darryl W. Bullock

Illustrated. 198 pp. The Overlook Press. $24.95.

One of the daunting aspects of biography, from the reader’s
point of view, is length, which is why we like obituaries. An obituary gives us
a life in under a page — and for some lives that’s as much as we feel we need.
The 600- or 700-page biography, complete with lengthy lists of sources, can be
tough going. Under 200 pages, which is the length of Darryl W. Bullock’s
charming “Florence! Foster!! Jenkins!!!,” is just about right for those who
want to know more about the world’s worst opera singer but might not want to
know absolutely every detail.

The story of Florence Foster Jenkins is quite astonishing.
Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family in 1868, she showed a strong early
interest in music and the arts and succeeded in graduating from a music academy.
She made an unsatisfactory marriage to a physician, and when this ended in
divorce she enjoyed the life of a socialite in New York. After her father’s
will “mysteriously vanished” from his office safe, she succeeded, with her
mother, to his extremely large estate and took up residence in a Manhattan
hotel. There she conducted the life of a patroness of the arts, assisted and
encouraged by an English actor, St Clair Bayfield, with whom she entered into
what the couple described as a secret marriage.

Then the performances started in earnest, and over the years
she established a considerable reputation for singing at the soirees of the
various clubs and societies she supported, attracting an enthusiastic audience
of well-heeled New Yorkers. They loved her. They loved her elaborate,
ridiculous costumes; they loved her overdramatic gestures. They presented her
with bouquet after bouquet as well as expensive jeweled trinkets to show how
much they appreciated her efforts. But she couldn’t sing. She was gloriously,
spectacularly, irredeemably out of tune.

Not that this stopped her. She once observed that although
some people said she couldn’t sing, they could never say she didn’t sing.
Nothing was too difficult for her to attempt — not even Mozart’s notoriously
demanding “Queen of the Night” aria. Higher and higher she would go, squeaking
and clinging on to the notes, taking her audience with her in sheer ­delight at
her audacity. And when it came to recordings, she tackled these in a single
take, apparently believing the excruciating results were incomparably good.

Bullock deals with all this in a thoroughly readable and
entertaining way. His explanation of how she got away with it is convincing:
She was loved, she was magnanimous, and she brought happiness and laughter to
those fortunate enough to get tickets to her concerts. Why shouldn’t one get
away with something like that, if that is the sort of person one is? We all
love sheer slapstick failure, particularly when it’s clothed in camp and
presented as high art. Florence Foster Jenkins was Tintin’s Bianca Castafiore
and Groucho Marx’s Margaret Dumont rolled into one. What’s not to love in that?

This appealing little biography — which arrives just as a
film version of its heroine’s story, starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, has
been released in the United States — is warmhearted and delightful. At its core
is a touching love story, as well as a message about the human spirit. Florence
Foster Jenkins was generous in her outlook and seems to have brought joy and
light into the lives of many. In a world where slickness, ambition and greed
have destroyed the spirit of amateurism, here is the great and utterly hopeless
amateur filling Carnegie Hall. What a message for our times.